How environmental noise and harvest affect population synchrony....

We show proportional harvesting of species increases the spatial region undergoing simultaneous population depletion on the arrival of an unfavorable random environmental change. This increase in population spatial coherence may have important consequences for conservation, and should be taken into account in the design of harvesting and conservation policies.

We also study how competition between species affects the scale of population synchrony. The effect of competition is more complicated, and in particular we show how harvesting of one species may affect the spatial distribution of the competing species. These results provide tools to go from the design of species based conservation policies to the design of ecosystem interactions between species (as competition), and go beyond conservation policies oriented to individual species. This modelling provide some general principles that can be implemented when developing multi-species harvest-strategies.

The authors through Francisco J. Cao

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